Musings from the Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning

As of October 19, 2018, you no longer need to manually save your answers when taking a quiz! As you complete each question on a quiz, your responses will now be automatically saved. Below, we’ve put images showing the old version (with the save button) next to what it will look like when a question saves automatically.

Here you can see there are a number of save icons and a manual save button.

Here you can see the save button and icon are gone. Instead, you see “saved” and a check mark to indicate your answer has been saved.

Note for faculty: The quiz event log will show whenever a question is automatically saved, including an updated character count for Written Response questions.

No More Save Buttons

Since your questions are automatically saved, the “Save” and “Save All Responses” buttons have been removed. The “Go to Submit Quiz” button is being renamed “Submit Quiz”. Don’t worry: There’s still a confirmation screen after that which lets you know if you left any questions blank and prompts you to make sure you’re ready to submit.

Internet Connection Status Notifications

VIULearn will now notify you if your internet connection is lost while taking a quiz. It will also let them know when the connection has been restored. This is what these notifications look like.

When you lose internet connection during a quiz, this pop-up will persist on your screen until you regain connection. Do not close your browser while this message is on the screen.

Once your connection is restored, VIULearn will automatically save all of the answers on the current page.

Note for faculty: The quiz log will record when a lost connection is restored.

Saving Written Response Questions as You Type

If the formatting bar (also known as the HTML or WYSIWYG editor) is appears for written answer questions, answers will not not auto-save as you type. To make sure your response saves as you work, click anywhere outside the text box periodically to prompt VIULearn to save your work.

Click outside the text box at any time while you work to save what you have so far. Changes will save the next time you click outside the box.

Written Response questions that do not have the HTML editor enabled, as well as other text-box question types (like fill-in-the-blank), will autosave every 30 seconds while you are typing.

Why is my question still “Saving…”

You may encounter a situation in which the auto-save feature on a question continues to display Saving… rather than Saved even once you have chosen or written your response. If this happens, confirm you are still connected to the internet and then confidently complete the rest of your quiz. Your answer will be saved when you either move between pages or go to submit your quiz.

Best Practices for Writing Quizzes

For the best quiz experience on VIULearn we recommend using a wired connection whenever possible. This reduces the chance of losing internet connectivity during a quiz. If you are taking your quiz from a smartphone or tablet, we recommend accessing the quiz from the menu under Assessment and Quizzes rather than from content as this will give you more room on your screen for the quiz questions. If you have a desktop or laptop computer available, these devices offer the best user interface for quiz taking.

Stay Tuned!

Our software vendor, D2L is continually working to improve and bring new features to their software. We will continue to provide updates on what these improvements will look like to students and faculty through the news area on your VIULearn home page. There are some exciting changes are coming over the next few months and we look forward to sharing them with you.

If you have any questions, the Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning is here to help: